An action shot is a form of time-lapse photography that captures a sequence of actions of an object across a static background in a single photograph. The action shot portrays a short story and is easy to share and view compared to watching a video. Example action shots can portray a baby's first steps, a scoring basketball shot, a sequence of dance moves, a daring parkour jump, and a challenging trick on a skateboard. In addition to capturing personal moments, action shots can capture movement of non-human or inanimate objects, including animals (e.g., flying birds, jumping dogs, running horses), celestial objects (e.g., setting sun, eclipsing moon) and technology (e.g., working robots, moving vehicles).
Conventional techniques used for generating action shots involve manually selecting individual frames from a video and stitching the frames together to create the action shot. This requires a user to manually search and filter through a large number of frames to select ideal frames for the action shot, such as frames that are in focus and capture unique actions. After selecting the frames, the user manually extracts an object or subject from the selected frames and positions the extracted objects onto a background, e.g., through interaction with a computing device. As a result, the process of generating an action shot is tedious, laborious, and time-consuming and requires photograph editing skills.
In order to reduce an amount of time it takes to manually search and filter, a user may use conventional techniques to reduce a total number of frames. For example, the user may collect fewer frames, such as by reducing a number of frames per second a camera captures and/or collecting images using a burst mode instead of using video. Alternatively, a user may use a program of a computing device to filter frames based on an interval number of frames or a predetermined time interval. For example, the program can sequentially sort through the frames and select every third frame or frames that are one second apart.
Although these conventional techniques speed up the manual process of generating the action shot, these conventional techniques may not capture or select the frames containing the best action images for use in the action shot. This is especially true when the object alternates between fast and slow motions. As such, the conventional techniques employed by a computing device may select too few frames during the fast motion such that the selected frames fail to capture ideal action moments. Additionally, the conventional techniques may select too many frames during the slow motion such that the selected frames capture redundant, overlapping instances of the object. Thus, the user may still have to filter through the selected frames to select frames for the action shot. As such, conventional methods provide a limited ability, if at all, to automatically select frames and automatically generate the action shot.